With such a high volume of products on the Staples.ca site, connecting customers with
the right items as quickly as possible is of utmost importance. Jeff and Diptendu
noticed two main customer groups: those shopping more frequently and knowing what
they need, or those shopping less frequently who need to be shown what new and
exciting products are available. This presents both an interesting challenge and an
opportunity for the Product Management team: how do you keep things simple and
streamlined for one group, yet highlight exploration and new products for the second?
Ensuring the website can respond equally well to both groups is a key part of their
ecommerce experience; yet the team's legacy search tools were not keeping up. Some
were very manual and required the use of spreadsheets (which were hard to keep up to
date) while others appeared modern, but provided little visibility and no explanation for
how and why results were changing. Jeff and team wanted a solution that was smart
and fast, yet flexible enough to understand and have control over the relevance and
search results.
Catering to diverse audiences
The challenge
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Staples Canada
